Despite high prices of fruits and vegetables, India's area under horticultural crops - mainly fruits, vegetables, spices and flowers - has doubled in around twenty years (between 1991-92 and 2012-13). This has resulted in increase in production of horticultural crops nearly threefold (2.8 times). A new report from the Ministry of Agriculture says that the area under horticultural crops during this period rose from 12.77 million hectares to 23.69 million...

-Down to Earth The government is clueless about incentives it has promised under its Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana to bring every family under the formal banking system ON AUGUST 15, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced extending the financial inclusion plan of the former UPA government and renamed it Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), he was well aware of its limitations. Though launched in 2010, the plan had miserably failed...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government on Wednesday recast the almost defunct Prime Minister's council on climate change, a move seen as an effort to handle climate issues pro-actively from the top. The revamped body is to meet soon to take key policy decisions ahead of the Lima climate conference next month. Environmentalist Sunita Narain has been dropped from the body - an apparent reflection of the Centre's discomfiture with...

-The Indian Express Attitudes toward climate change in India can appear paradoxical. Although India is one of the countries most deeply vulnerable to climate impacts, climate change does not rank high on policymakers' list of concerns. Two factors explain this inattention. First, India has pressing and immediate development concerns, such as providing sanitation, improved healthcare and access to affordable energy to its population, while the effects of climate change appear abstract...

-The Hindustan Times Mumbai: In the past two decades, the National Crime Records Bureau has recorded 60,750 farmer suicides in the state. This means more than 3,000 farmers have killed themselves every year, reflecting a deepening agrarian crisis untouched by policies and subsidies doled out by the government. To get the state back on its feet, the new BJP government needs to start from agriculture and allied sectors. In the past...